Facebook Plans to Boost Staff 50% This Year, Zuckerberg Says (opens in new tab)

That's ambitious. Especially considering that they aren't making money right now. One would think that Facebook would be looking to cut costs rather than take on new costs.

Facebook has some really impressive technology behind them, but they keep expanding in a way that doesn't generate positive revenue. As Facebook becomes more popular, it's likely to need more staff, but at some point it's also just losing more money.

Is there anyone would like to share his or her experience working at Facebook? Do they have a hacker friendly environment?

I'm still in my 20s, so take my limited business experience with a grain of salt. But every time I've witnessed a company pre-announce an aggressive hiring binge like this, what happened was a hiring surge followed by an equally precipitous exodus less than 18 months after the announcement. It's funny that the article mentions cash flow because the exoduses I have seen have been precisely because cash flow got out of hand with the implementation of the strategy. It's not just salaries that increase. People need places to work so new office space needs to be acquired; the IT infrastructure needs to be updated to accommodate the new hires; people get promoted into positions overseeing the new hires where they prove to be incompetent and this results in wasted labour and duplicated effort; etc. One of the reasons I think such a hiring binge is terrible is because it usually causes forward momentum of the company to slow drastically if not stop entirely. The 12 month transition period where the company is trying to come to terms with everything is a prime opportunity for competitors to pounce and steal away revenue, resulting in cash flow to slow.